Places&Faces I'd like to know better.

Places&Faces I'd like to know better. - Page Text Content

S: St. Petersburg

FC: St. Petersburg

1: What first comes to mind when one mentions the St. Petersburg city? Peter the First, movable bridges, houses-wells, the Hermitage, the white nights, the Mariinsky and Uliana Lopatkina... each has its own associations. For me, this city is interesting by its ambiguity.

2: And its ubiquity is the main theme of my album.

3: St. Petersburg greets festively its tourists. But what do we know about its history?

4: What do these

5: walls remember?

6: It seems that everything disappears and nothing remains. But no one and nothing disappears. To realize it we just need sometimes a special gift of vision.

9: Once I thought I was the only one such a crazy person: I looked at the contemporary streets and saw through the tinsel and showcases of the renovated facades the crowd wearing outfits you had never worn and the history of an old city.

11: But it turns out that there are people who know how this particular dimension of an Old Town not only to see but to show it to the rest.

12: The following collages by Sergei Larenkov are just amazing: he took a well-known city and revealed its essence. But the fact is that the place where lived and died many many people exists according to absolutely different laws of time then ours.

13: It was enough time for introduction... Now just watch:

30: I've just realized why I was so touched by these works. No, it's a wrong verb: these collages don't touch but make stronger like any true art. All is not in vain: that is what these pictures are about.

33: Uliana Lopatkina

34: Such ballerinas as Maya Plisetskaya, Galina Ulanova, Nina Ananiashvili embody every ballet era. Now, at the beginning of the century, Uliana Lopatkina is # 1. It seems incredible that such a beautiful and delicate woman like Uliana can be so strong, controlled, athletic, and artistic, but she is. She's just gorgeous!

36: I love how her interpretation involves a constant stream of motion - she is rarely still or makes jerky movements.

39: After graduation she joined the Mariinsky Theatre at the age of 18. Since her youth Uliana has been outstanding dancer. Lopatkina’s genius lies in her unwavering attention to detail. It is her precision to impart perfection to roles and steps, a level of flawlessness that not all professionals can achieve. Her own discrimination within her repertoire – refusing to dance Aurora, for instance, because, in her mind, the role is meant for a small, compact ballerina – attests to the presence of careful consideration and evaluation, not only of how she dances, but of what she dances, and why.

40: Lopatkina's approach to her art is intellectual, and perhaps therein lies some of its attraction.

41: Though she was born in Kerch she is a pure Saint-Petersburger for me.

43: Japan

44: Japan is like a separate planet on the Earth. Its culture is not | just multiform – it carries plenty of such notions and phenomenon, which are simply mysterious for foreigners.

47: The reason is that Japanese have always been able to find a harmony in every usual object, in each sphere of their lives.

49: The main idea behind the Japanese art is a transmission of inner essence of an object or a certain philosophical concept through the visual image. And the image here is just the means of this transmitting. Just imagine: this plum-tree is more than one hundred years old! The attainment of perfection can take a lifetime.

51: The Land of the Rising Sun is an incredible mix of ancient traditions and new technologies; it's a distinctive and super-modern society at the same time.

52: Takashi Amano

55: He have created his own aquarium style. Live aquariums of Takashi Amano attract by their unusual "inner" glow. Bonsai in the aquarium this is a short describing of his amazing work. As a true artist Takashi Amano creates so called paintings in water.

56: Japanese aquarium is a small model of the world, which is organized according to an everlasting process of nature. In the biological sense it is a well-balanced and finely tuned stable ecosystem. It is created entirely of natural materials, and each element performs its natural function.

60: The correlation of plant and animals in the aquarium is a very important feature and to gain both the ecological balance of the system and the perfect image is the main aim of the aquarist.

65: Takashi Amano's aquarium is an underwater landscape which was created by using the thousands of living plants, artistically combined with other natural objects such as: fish, invertebrates, rocks and snags. And all these within the integrity of the composition. It has the title, plot and the other characteristics of an art object.